I have been traveling the world as a journalist and passionate lover of all things fun for 20 years. I have had weekly columns in USA Today and Investors Business Daily, published thousands of articles in leading magazines from Playboy to Popular Science, and am the author of Getting Into Guinness. I am the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado Magazine, the restaurant columnist for USAToday.com, and am a co-founder of TheAPosition.com, the leading golf travel website. I love every kind of travel, active, cultural and leisurely, and my special areas of expertise are luxury hotels and resorts, golf, skiing, food, wine and spirits. I tweet @TravelFoodGuy

7/14/2013 @ 11:34AM40,724 views

Why You Need (Want?) A New Road Bike

The best new recreational road bikes, like the BMC GranFondo, combine very high-quality carbon fiber frames and engineering with a more comfortable ride and cutting edge features like electronic shifting. I took such a bike for a road test.

This spring I wrote a 2-part, 2013 Bicycle Buyers Guide here at Forbes.com on the latest advances in road cycling technology and How to Shop For a Road Bike. I covered the three biggest new trends, comfortable frame geometry designs, improvements that have made carbon fiber the dominant frame material choice, and the advent of electronic shifting. Nearly 40,000 readers tuned in, so I thought it would be appropriate to see firsthand where the rubber met the road, so to speak, with these major road cycling innovations.

For this reason I’ve spent the past few weeks personally testing all of these advances, and the bottom line is I want a new bike. You will too. The difference is that dramatic.

BMC, a very highly regarded Swiss road and mountain bicycle manufacturer, was kind enough to lend me new bike to test that incorporated all there of these major developments. BMC has one of the top teams racing in the Tour De France, led by Cadel Evans, who won the race, cycling’s biggest event, with Team BMC in 2011. You can buy the same racing model ridden by Evans and his teammates for Le Tour, the SLR01, but that’s not what I chose. One of the dominant themes of my previous piece was the industry-wide move towards comfort for all-day riding, featuring a more upright (less hunched over) frame geometry, resulting in more endurance and less back pain for recreational cyclists. This is especially important as the number of cyclists doing longer charity rides, gran fondos (see below) and triathlons has greatly increased. As I wrote, “People have long been buying bikes with racing DNA, but the vast majority of bike buyers never race. A NASCAR vehicle is faster than your typical BMW, but which would you rather drive on a long road trip?” Manufacturers finally acknowledged this, and in a big way, with virtually every company now offering an entire line of comfortable yet still high-performance bikes, and BMC is no exception, with its Endurance Series.

It is important to remember that while terms like “comfort bike” used to imply inferior quality, this is clearly no longer the case. The model I chose, the GranFondo GF01, is also raced at the very highest levels – Evans and Team BMC put aside their SLR01 and instead used this particular model for the historic Paris-Roubaix race, infamous for its brutal section of riding over rough cobblestone. They chose it because the ride is so supple and shock absorbing it allowed them to make better time over rougher roads. I chose it because it combines all three of the main innovative features I covered in my earlier piece: a very high-end full-carbon frame, more relaxed geometry, and electronic shifting.

There are other companies offering similarly equipped bikes that combine these three factors, and much of the experience I enjoyed could be had on another model. But the specific reason I chose the BMC to test is because if I were shopping for a new road bike, this is the model I would immediately gravitate to, as it offers very high-quality cutting edge frame design and the most advanced use of carbon fiber technology, all to rave reviews at a competitive price. Bicycling Magazine road tested it and wrote, “This race-ready bike delivers a smooth, fast ride on a variety of terrain…aimed squarely at endurance-minded roadies.” The model as I tested it retails for about $6,800 though many dealers discount. That sounds like a lot of money, and in the abstract it is, but there are off the shelf bikes costing about twice as much, and the market for high-performance endurance bikes with electronic shifting and lightweight full carbon frames, starts around $5,000. The same exact GF01 is also available with non-electric but still very high quality Shimano Ultegra shifting for just under $5,000. But, as I elaborated in my earlier Buyer’s Guide, you can spend as little as $2,000 and get a quality road bike. This is a very high-quality road bike.

[BTW, the term grand fondo refers to organized mass group participation rides, usually of long distances, with riders competing against the clock, more akin to a running marathon than a typical charity ride where the goal is often simply to finish. The bike takes this name because this is exactly the kind of recreational endurance event the technology lends itself to, with enhanced comfort and efficiency over many miles and hours.]

Electronic shifting is the wave of the future in road bikes, but you can still greatly improve your recreational riding experience, endurance and comfort without paying the hefty cost for this luxury.

The important thing is that not all carbon fiber is the same, not by a long shot. It is essentially a woven material, making the quality variances in the market far broader than for aluminum or titanium, and in a sense it is comparable to cotton or wool in that it can span a very big range of manufacturing reliability, with BMC’s carbon akin to the finest Scottish cashmere. To oversimplify, carbon fiber comes in two distinct variations, low and high modulus, one being exceedingly flexible, the other very stiff. Make a frame entirely out of either and you have bike that is too spongy, and does not transfer energy well, or a ride that is extremely stiff and transmits shock to the rider, which might as well be aluminum. Better companies mix the two on different parts of the bike, and BMC blends the two throughout, using both in individual tubes. This is Swiss precision engineering at its finest, with a design that is the best of both worlds, offering incredible shock absorbing characteristics along with an extremely stiff and efficient drive train and pedaling platform that maximizes rider energy.

Just for quick background and perspective, I am very much a recreational rider, not a racer, and in addition to frequent fitness and fun rides of typically 25-55 miles, I usually do a few one-day charity rides of 100-120 miles each season, and in most years, travel to do a multi-day riding tour, anywhere from Colorado to Italy. My personal bike is a lightweight titanium Seven, and I also ride an ultra-light single speed road bike converted from a then top of the line Specialized aluminum road racing frame, so I have some experience riding high quality bikes of varying frame materials, though not much with this kind of high-end full carbon. I used the GF01 regularly for my recent leisure rides, and this past weekend rode it in a 100-mile charity event that I have done on the same route for the past 8 years to give it a real full-day, endurance-oriented, apples to apples comparison. I was astonished.

The very first thing I noticed when I picked up the loaner bike was how light it was, even compared to my titanium frame, and when I went to put it on my roof rack it felt like a feather. The first thing I noticed when I started riding was just how much road shock the carbon frame absorbed. Carbon fiber is inherently shock absorbing, or what the bike industry calls compliant, at the very opposite end of the spectrum from aluminum, which is very stiff and harsh and transmits every imperfection in the road surface to the rider and the handlebars (though aluminum frame deigns are getting much better at compensating for this). Because of the weird weather patterns the past few years, the roads of rural New England, where I live, are more beat up and cracked than ever, but riding the GF01 it was hard to tell. A few days earlier I rode my aluminum bike on some of the same stretches and got bounced around in the saddle.

Frankly, I expected the ride to be plusher, but I was shocked at just how dramatically better it was. At one point in the century, I looked down and was surprised to see how cracked the road was, because I couldn’t feel it. Even big hits, like crossing railroad tracks, were greatly minimized. One thing I hadn’t considered until doing this long ride was that this bike is not just more comfortable, but also safer – on high speed descents it ate up cracks, potholes and imperfections that could potentially lead to crashes on a stiffer frame. At the same time, it handled great, with a tighter turning radius than my bike.

While this amazing level of dampening is good for comfort, stiffness in a bike frame correlates to efficiency and transfer of energy to the drivetrain. This is where the design, not just the material comes in. BMC foregoes conventional tube-shaped construction for a more rectangular box approach, and this highly engineered Swiss wonder gives all the benefits of a plush ride with amazing pedaling stiffness, meaning less effort, more efficiency, more endurance, and importantly, better handing with precise, responsive steering. Climbing was easier and while passing riders on uphills I felt like I had been shot out of a cannon. It simply rides like a dream.

The electronic shifting was also new to me over this much riding day in and day out, and at first I thought it was just a nice convenience but hardly life changing. If you have good quality, well maintained shifters and derailleurs, manual shifting is no hardship. But one nice thing about the electronic is that it essentially requires no maintenance. It is also idiot-proof, impossible to miss-shift and derail the chain, something that happens to recreational riders with some frequency. You can also shift “too late” into a hill climb where normal mechanical shifting wouldn’t be advised. All this became especially relevant later in the 100-mile ride as my attention wandered – even if you shift in the wrong direction, this is remedied instantly with another push of the button. Crest a hill and want to drop into a big gear? Simply pump the button and the chain will race across the width of your cassette, faster than you could possibly shift it manually. It is also a big advantage for women or riders with small hands who are always reaching for the shifters. My wife rode her bike with mechanical shifters in the century and at the end, said her hands were sore from all the shifting over six hours. For me, it was less strenuous than typing this story. There’s a reason why even the pro racers in the Tour, who already know how to shift perfectly, opt for the new technology. But if money is an object, you’ll get more bang for your buck by buying a better quality frame, wheels and overall bike than by upgrading to electronic shifting, so something like the GF01 with mechanical shifters might be a better investment than a $5,000 bike with electronic. Is electronic shifting something you need? No. Is it something you would want? Absolutely.

As for the relaxed geometry, it is hard to tell how much of the comfort and enhanced endurance I experienced came from the frame geometry, and how much from the carbon fiber ride itself, but either way, the bike rode ultra-smooth and at the end of the long day I felt much less beat up than usual – when I crossed the finish line, it felt like I had done maybe a 60-mile ride. The next day my legs were not even sore, and usually I hobble around for a day or two after a ride like this. It is also worth noting that my own bike is heavily customized for fit, while this was out of the box and all I have done is adjust the seat. Without perfectly setting up the handlebars and stem for reach, changing saddles and so on, I would expect any rental/loaner bike to make by back sore over this length ride. I this case I would have been wrong. I can only imagine how nice the GF01 woods be if I owned it and took the time to get a dialed in fitting, something I cannot recommend enough to any bike buyer. The combination of these winning factors, high-quality carbon fiber, a better frame design for recreational endurance riding, and first rate components, including the newest electronic shifting, make for a bike that is a joy to ride, and an instantly noticeable world of difference from pretty much any road bike more than a couple of years old. Mine is about 7 or 8, and if you are in my camp, you will feel the same way I did if you were to try a model like the BMC GF01: you would need, or at least really want, a new bike.

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Hey Larry. I read all three of your recent posts related to bicycles and the advances in technology. They’re very informative and influential. Thanks.

Would you consider writing another one recommending say 10-15 bicycles in different price ranges for commuters/recreational users? Also a deeper analysis of carbon fiber v titanium frames. Lastly, how important/useful are suspensions and dampeners on bicycles for commuters/recreational users? Thanks again for the wonderful post!

Jaimini, Thanks! Unfortunately, I don’t physically have the time to test another 10-15 bikes, especially commuting models, as I live in a rural area and don’t commute. But as I mentioned in my posts, the general quality of name brand bikes is excellent these days, and it’s tough to go wrong buying from a reputable manufacturer, and there is less nitpicking over small differences at the lower price range you allude to. As to the titanium vs carbon issue, I love my titanium frame, but I also loved the carbon frame I tested, and both materials offer a winning combination of ride comfort/quality, light weight and power transfer. The one obvious advantage of titanium is that it doesn’t appreciably fatigue, is hard to damage and will last even a high mileage rider a lifetime. However, titanium is rare outside of custom bikes, and carbon fiber is widely available from every major manufacturer and at prices much more affordable than titanium. Shock absorption systems vary in their effectiveness and range from fork and frame suspensions to seat posts, but I think commuters, who face tough road conditions and generally are not as concerned with shaving ounces will usually benefit, maybe greatly, from a bike with some shock absorption.

Hi Larry. I am currently riding a Felt Z85. It is aluminum with a carbon fork & seatpost. Mostly 105 components except for the brakes and crankset. I am pretty happy with it. I wouldn’t mind a bike that is a few lbs. lighter. Any thoughts on the Lynsky Peloton? I was wondering if a titanium bike needs a fat and oval downtube to add stiffness in the bottom bracket area?